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After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

albertofortin.com

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Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#111

Post by VMG »

a7fort wrote: post #28
VMG wrote: post #11

I get it and I see the same problems as the author. I'm working on a few toy projects and I am using LLM for 90% of it. The result is 10x faster than if I coded it "by hand", but the architecture is worse and somewhat alien. I'm still keeping at it, because I'm convinced that LLM driven code is where things are headed, inevitably. These tools are just crazy powerful, but we will have to learn how to use them in a way…

I hope we get to that "10x better" point. I think the problem right now is people advertising LLMs as if we're there already. And it's not just the providers, it's also the enthusiasts on X/Reddit/etc that think they have found the perfect workflow or prompt. Just like you're mentioning "maybe better prompt engineering", I feel like we're being conditioned to think "I'm just not using it right" where maybe the tool i…

Well "I'm just not using it right" is a perfectly reasonable thought for a new technology. Isn't this the default? When new powerful tools come along, they often fit awkwardly into existing processes.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#112

Post by cosiiine »

jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

The AI-Assist tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, etc) want you to be "all-in" and that's why so many people end up fighting them. A delicate balance is hard to achieve when you're discarding 80% of the suggestions for 20% of the productivity boosts.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#113

Post by mexicocitinluez »

voidhorse wrote: post #87
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get the point you’re trying to make, LLMs can be a force multiplier for less experienced devs, but the sweeping generalizations don’t hold up. If you’re okay with a higher tolerance for bugs or loose guardrails, sure, LLMs can feel magical. But that doesn’t mean they’re less valuable to experienced developers. Amen. Seriously. They're tools. Sometimes they work wonderfully. Sometimes, not so much. But I have DEFI…

> Amen. Seriously. They're tools. Sometimes they work wonderfully. Sometimes, not so much. But I have DEFINITELY found value. And I've been building stuff for over 15 years as well. Yes, but these lax expectation s are what I don't understand. What other tools in software sometimes work and sometimes don't that you find remotely acceptable? Sure all tools have bugs, but if your compiler had the same failure rate and…

> Yes, but these lax expectation s are what I don't understand.

It's pretty a really, really simple concept.

If I have a crazy Typescript error, for instance, I can throw it in and get a much better idea of what's happening. Just because that's not perfect, doesn't mean it isn't helpful. Even if it works 90% of the time, it's still better than 0% of the time (Which is where I was at before).

It's like google search without ads and with the ability to compose different resources together. If that's not useful to you, then I don't know what to tell you.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#114

Post by rossdavidh »

Hypothesis: the actual long-term impact of LLM's on coding will be that more different languages get used, because it reduces the "ugh I don't want to have to learn all that" psychological obstacle that prevents programmers experienced in one language from learning another. We should be using different languages for different tasks, but the push has always been to try to get One Language To Rule Them All. Ten years ago people tried to make Javascript their db query language and their backed language. More recently, the push is to use Python for everything. Both languages are fine in certain domains, but a poor fit in others.

Even if the idea that an LLM will help you do it is false, perhaps it is still a good idea if it convinces the experienced programmer to go ahead and use SQL for the query, Go for the async, Javascript for the frontend, etc. Right now, few if any companies would let you use the best tool for the job, if that's not one they already use. Perhaps the best use of LLMs is to convince programmers, and their bosses, to use the best tool for each job.

But, after you've gotten past that part, you will probably (like the author of this article) need to throw away the LLM-generated code and write it yourself.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#115

Post by mrbluecoat »

1. Company uses AI for some development

2. The ratio increases and programmer layoffs begin

3. Bugs appear, AI handles most but not all

4. Bug complexity increases, company hires programmers to fix

5. Programmers can't decipher AI code mess

6. Programmers quit

7. Company unable to maintain their product

> the horror ensues

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#116

Post by martinald »

I agree with this and matches my thinking (however - the fact that this is even an option is an incredible breakthrough that I did not expect to happen preLLMs - potentially in decades).

I have basically given up on "in IDE" AI for now. I simply have a web interface on my 2nd monitor of whatever the "best" LLM (currently Gemini, was Claude) is and copy paste snippets of code back and forth or ask questions.

This way I have to physically copy and paste everything back - or just redo it "my way", which seems to be enough of an overhead that I have to mentally understand it. When it's in an IDE and I just have to tick accept I just end up getting over eager with it, over accepting things and then wishing I hadn't, and spend more time reverting stuff when the penny drops later this is actually a bad way to do things.

It's really more a UX/psychology problem at the moment. I don't think the 'git diff' view of suggested changes is the right one that many IDEs use for it - I'm psychologically conditioned to review these like pull requests and it seems my critique of these is just not aligned to critiquing LLM code. 99% of PR reviews I do are finding edge cases and clarifying things. They're not looking at very plausible yet subtly completely wrong code (in the most part).

To give a more concrete example; if someone is doing something incredibly wrong in 'human PRs' they will tend to name the variables wrong because they clearly don't understand the concept, at which point the red flag goes off in my head.

In LLM PRs the variables are named often perfectly - but just don't do what they say they will. This means my 'red flag' doesn't fire as quickly.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#117

Post by [deleted] »

mritchie712 wrote: post #37
jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

[deleted]

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#118

Post by jrh3 »

mritchie712 wrote: post #37
jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

> have high tolerance for bugs and just want to ship

LOL

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#119

Post by pjm331 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #114

Hypothesis: the actual long-term impact of LLM's on coding will be that more different languages get used, because it reduces the "ugh I don't want to have to learn all that" psychological obstacle that prevents programmers experienced in one language from learning another. We should be using different languages for different tasks, but the push has always been to try to get One Language To Rule Them All. Ten years a…

counter hypothesis - fewer languages will be used because LLMs will be better at languages with lots of training data

I never write python in my day to day but every from-scratch project I've knocked out with Claude code has been in python because that's what it seems to default to if I don't specify anything

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#120

Post by meander_water »

Xcelerate wrote: post #98

I noticed a funny thing a while back after using the “bird’s eye view” capability in my car to help with parallel parking: I couldn’t parallel park without that feature anymore after a few years. It made for an awkward situation every time I visited the Bay Area and rented a car. I realized I had become so dependent on the bird’s eye view that I had lost the ability to function without it. Luckily in this particular…

The main narrative has been that developers who don't use AI are going to get left behind, but I think what's actually going to happen is that developers who retain their cognitive abilities are going to become rarer and more sought after.
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